Monday, May 30, 2011

Psychoanalysis and Film: The Cinematographic Stratification of Gender Roles

With the advent of utilizing psychoanalytic theory as an outlet for the conceptualization of cinema, it is important to explore the methods through which dominant reflections of societal politics and ideology are imparted, unconsciously or with willful designs, by filmmakers upon spectators. Laura Mulvey's 1975 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” posits that on the basis of various modes of optic and other cinematic representation, conventional narrative cinema codifies and exacerbates male patriarchal empowerment at the expense of female autonomy outside the confines of their symbolic subordinance to men – as “signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”

Indeed, while the existence of a gendered hierarchy within cinema is predicated on its normative societal analogue, for the intents of this essay, I will seek to analyze the extent to which cinema perpetuates the prevailing misogynistic social apparatus with regards to the designated and constructed role of gender in human behavior. As such, is there a symbiotic relationship that exists between cinema and reality? Does (conventional) cinema merely serve as a propagandist tool to preserve and indefinitely reinforce the status quo of female objectification and the gaze of male patriarchal narcissism? To what extent has an alternative to the despotic “phallocentric order” emerged to challenge the predominant order? Do female directors, their psyches potentially ingrained with conventional ideology, unconsciously and masochistically sustain the existing condition of patriarchy on the basis of their own projections developed by patriarchal society? Drawing upon my own critical engagements with Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) and Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991), I will apply my own ideas to these concerns through the lens
of Mulvey's arguments.

With the arbitrary formation of a linguistically-rendered Symbolic order within both society and the cinema, the crux of Mulvey's essay postulates that female “castration,” a prerequisite to the strengthening of patriarchal order, underscores womanhood's “lack” of phallic endowment – literally as well as Symbolically. She goes on to write that the “visual pleasure” acquired by the fixation of the male gaze upon the sexualized, castrated woman – both within the narrative and by way of male spectatorship upon objectified portrayals of women – must be shattered and ultimately subverted by analyzing it. “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” In the context of Argento's film, this argument can be considered by virtue of the juxtaposition between the film's spectacular visual direction and pleasure, and by its tantalizing premise. To this end, the structured roles of gender are established but ultimately thwarted by the film's narrative as a defiantly feminist horror film that assails the prevailing masculine order by its intent and many facets of its narrative, but may preserve aspects of residual patriarchy within its unconscious structure. This is because the female body is never expressly sexualized even though it is literally continually victimized by violence throughout the span of the film with the implications of manifest threats from a seemingly omnipotent “male” Other (the killer, who is later revealed to have been female) as its point of identification.

Embracing female points of identification – even at the belated expense of Pat, her female friend, and Sarah at the hands of a presumably male aggressor – marks a considerable sense of defiance to the domineering hierarchical patriarchy buttressed by most conventional narrative cinema, especially considering the presuppositions associated with an all-girl dancing school. By and large, Argento betrays the scopophilic voyeurism anticipated by the viewer's expectations of the film, making their ultimate betrayal all the more poignantly triumphant for a feminist subversion of “phallocentric order” – especially by the enormous power he ascribes to the witch matriarchy. However, remnants of patriarchy remain embedded within the film's configurations. While women are not eroticized to the degree that viewers can foretell, “conventional close-ups of legs ... or a face” remain part of the film's fabric to “integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism,” however unconsciously. But more significantly on the basis of the narrative paradigm, it is ultimately only with the guidance of two academic males that Suzy Banyon discovers and overthrows the witch coven hidden within the “iris” of the academy. Their presence as two of the only significant male characters in the film, as well as their dynamism in advancing the film's narrative, suggests that male authorization may be essential for the promotion of cinematic (and/or societal) liberation for womanhood as a signifying spectacle for man – as does the fact that Dario Argento himself is male. While male acquiescence may be welcomed as a means of incremental progress in ultimately thwarting the subtext of patriarchy, even within the context of the comparatively radical Suspiria, one can apply Mulvey's criticism of conventional cinematic constraints. “The narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making thing happen ... the man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense.” Can femininity transcend the confines established by patriarchy without the precondition of male “permission” – even in a film like Suspiria?

Although Katheryne Bigelow's Point Break (1991) was directed by a woman, it is noteworthy by virtue of its strict adherence to phallocentric order and a strong sense of female subservience to the underlying constructs. “This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring a film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify,” as Mulvey argues. With blockbuster stars such as Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, male audience members cast their modes of identification upon the “male movie star's glamorous characteristics ... [as] those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived” by the mirror stage. To this end, female characters – bikini-clad surfers, no less – are appropriated with the desirous male gaze both within the film and external to its cinematic confines by male subjects who identify with their ego ideal, who ultimately possesses the sexualized female body. To me, the film's subtext, though entertaining from a satirical perspective, is made even more deeply flawed by virtue of the fact that the leading female protagonist, portrayed by Lori Petty, is reluctant to accede to Keanu Reeves' romantic advances, but ultimately offers herself to him despite the initial resistance. This presents the underlying dilemma of imparting ideological politics of sexuality upon the film, thus ingraining normative conceptions regarding male and female relationships to spectators within reality. In this strong sense, in the era of mass-reproduction of entertainment vis-a-vis the Internet, television and the movie theater, perhaps now more than ever, “the cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.” These codes are consolidated in perpetuity, and even in the face of illusory female resistance to gendered stereotypes, as in Lori Petty's character in Katheryn Bigelow's film, they manage to persist as a bulwark of the pervasive and prevailing societal construction of patriarchy.